


rolling back again

by spibsy (lucy_and_ramona)



Series: see your world in traces [3]
Category: Professional Wrestling
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 15:31:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5253578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucy_and_ramona/pseuds/spibsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>seth has never believed in fate, but he doesn't know how else to explain him and dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rolling back again

**Author's Note:**

> commission for [praetorian-guard](http://praetorian-guard.tumblr.com/), who wanted fluffy, domestic dean/seth set in sywit-verse. i hope this meets your expectations!! ♥

Seth wonders, sometimes, how he and Dean ever ended up like this.

He doesn’t spend much time dwelling on it, because inevitably he just confuses himself, going in circles in his mind and trying to rearrange things — he doesn’t believe in fate, but he believes in him and Dean, in something about the two of them being inevitable.

He’s readjusted the way they met, their first interaction, their first everything, but no matter what Seth does, no matter the decisions he does or doesn’t make, his daydreams always end with Dean the way he is now, sprawled across their hotel bed, snoring so loud he’s gonna wake the whole floor.

Seth smiles to himself. He’s been awake for two hours now, gone out for a run, stopped in at the gym, checked in with Roman (asleep just like Dean is, but he’d answered his phone all the same, gruff and rumbly with morning irritation), got back to the hotel room, showered, and returned again with breakfast. Still, if he left Dean to his own machinations, he wouldn’t get out of bed for another two hours.

Hell, if he left Dean to do what he wanted, Dean wouldn’t get out of bed all day. And he probably wouldn’t let Seth out of the bed, either.

“Food,” he announces, loudly. Dean grunts, twists just enough to peer one bleary eye open at Seth. His hair’s in his face and the sheet’s riding low enough on his waist for Seth to feel a familiar spark of interest in his belly. To be fair, though, that could be hunger. He can smell bacon through the paper bag in his hand.

“Not so loud, princess,” Dean says, his voice even more throaty than it usually is. Seth’s stomach does a little flip. He remembers when that nickname would spark nothing but mild annoyance. Now, it’s as normal as if Dean had just said his name. “It’s barely dawn.”

“It’s ten,” says Seth after a glance at his watch. “Dawn broke like five hours ago. Time to get out of bed.”

“Or,” says Dean, with a hint of suggestion that Seth wouldn’t have thought him capable of this early, “you could get back in bed.”

“Nice try,” says Seth, wry, but he does sit back down on the bed if only to toe off his shoes and set down the bag of food close to Dean’s face in the hope that hash browns will make him more amiable to getting up.

Dean grumbles, but he does sit up, back against the headboard as he eyes the bag with curiosity. “What’d you get me?” he asks.

“Everything on the menu that sounded like it’d make your arteries scream,” says Seth, his lip curling a little. He has his cheat days like everybody else does, but he hates that every day is a cheat day for Dean, pretty much, and he never shows it. The man eats pure garbage for three out of three meals a day.

“Excellent,” Dean says, licking his lips. “C’mere.”

“No. Why?” Seth asks. He shuffles over to Dean anyway, where Dean’s made room for him, and he can’t stop from smiling when Dean slips an arm around his waist in a thoughtless way, noses up against Seth’s neck like a dog looking to be pet. Affably, Seth rubs the back of Dean’s neck. twists the ends of the hair at the nape of his neck.

Dean sighs in a heavy, satisfied way, his hand tightening on Seth’s hip. “G’mornin’,” he murmurs after a moment, kissing Seth’s neck and then, because he’s twelve at heart, blowing a raspberry underneath his jaw.

Seth curses, and rolls his eyes while Dean snickers. “Asshole,” he mutters, rubbing the side of his neck and giving Dean a sour look. Dean responds with a beauteous smile, toothy and innocent. Well, as innocent as Dean can ever look. Something about Dean is just permanently a little bit dirty, a little bit gruff and rusty around the edges. Seth likes that.

It’s one of his favorite things, actually, always has been and still is. Seth has always tried to maintain a certain presentation, and he thinks (though Dean’s never admitted it to him) that it’s one of the reasons Dean had wanted to get involved with him at all. Part of him, at one point, had thought of Seth as something good that he could ruin. Something he could get a little dirty.

Seth doesn’t know when that changed, or what changed it, but it’s not that way anymore. They’ve come too far and been too many things to be what they were at the beginning. Seth doesn’t miss it, but he does think a lot about evolution, the way things naturally progress into other things.

Are they something different than they were? Something new? Or are they just a new version of the same thing they were at the start?

“What’re you thinkin’ about?” Dean asks through a mouthful of pancake. He’s rummaged through the bag, retrieved a styrofoam container, and now he’s eating the pancakes from it like they’re fruit roll-ups. “Gotta stupid look on your face.”

“Thanks,” Seth says. He shrugs, settling back against Dean’s arm and stretching his legs out in front of him. His thighs ache pleasantly from last night, and his calves ache pleasantly from this morning. “Nothing, really. How we met.”

Dean pauses for a moment in his pancake munching, and frowns. Seth’s confused for a moment — it might have been a weird thing to say, but he didn’t think Dean would be upset about it. His expression clears when Dean begins to rummage in the bag again, and retrieves a little container of maple syrup.

“You mean that killer handjob I gave you in your locker room?” Dean asks, gnawing the lid of the syrup off with his front teeth. “I think about that all the time, mostly when I need somethin’ to jerk it to in the shower.”

“Charming.” Seth wrinkles his nose. “No. Well, not specifically.”

“So, yes,” Dean prompts, but he’s at least looking at Seth with open curiosity.

“No,” Seth says more firmly. “Just, how it all happened, you know? We went from one thing to something else.”

“I hear that’s how it works most of the time, actually,” says Dean, thoughtfully nibbling the end of another pancake. “One thing turning into something else.”

“Yeah, I guess,” says Seth. He can feel himself frowning even though he’s trying not to, and he sits back against the headboard.

“Hey—” Dean swipes crumbs from his lips and then squirms back against Seth’s side, nudging his thigh. “Okay, didn’t know you were being serious. I’m listening.”

Seth feels a tinge of self-consciousness, because it really isn’t serious, not at all, and he doesn’t know why he wanted to mention it at all. Dean hates this kind of thing, conversations about feelings and relationships. Seth’s not a huge fan of them either, actually, but it’s something he’s been thinking about lately. Him and Dean. Dean and him. Creating something from nothing. 

“Why’d you do it?” he finds himself asking, stretching his fingers out on his knee. It’s not quite an invitation, but Dean takes it anyway, lacing their fingers together casual as anything and continuing to eat with his other hand, his eyes piercing as he watches Seth.

“Do what?” Dean asks in response. He offers Seth a hashbrown and Seth takes it, breaking it in half and leaving Dean the rest. It makes his fingertips slick with still-hot grease and it tastes like three thousand calories but it’s warm all the way down to his stomach. “Jerk you off in your locker room two years ago?”

“Christ,” Seth mutters. He forgets sometimes, how long ago that was. How long they’ve been whatever exactly they are.

Roman asked him once, right at the beginning, just him and Seth while Dean was off doing something else. He asked what exactly they were, and he hadn’t looked embarrassed about it or anything, just curious and patient. Whoever he is in the ring, outside of it, Roman is the kind of calm that Seth needs, and the kind of calm he thinks Dean craves but can’t let himself want.

Seth hadn’t known how to answer. Because they’re — them, they’re Dean and Seth, they’re what they are, and they’ve tried to define it a million times in quiet not-arguments tucked close under the covers. They’re what they are. Seth’s given up trying to find a word for it.

“No, well, yeah, kind of,” he says, finally answering Dean’s question.

“I just, you know, I just love how clear you are when you talk, you’re just so easy to understand,” says Dean, licking hash brown grease and salt from his fingers. “Hey.”

He prods Seth’s ribs with his elbow, and it actually hurts, because Dean’s all points and lines and edges, but Seth does look up at him, which is what he was obviously aiming for. 

“It’s me,” Dean says, and he isn’t smiling but he is looking Seth right in the eye. “Come on. It’s me. Just say what you mean, okay?”

Seth nods, absent, twisting his hair tie around his wrist. It’s rhythmic, something to focus on, around and around and around.

“I’ve always thought it was just to fuck with my head,” he says finally. “It was, right? I’m not, like. Mad, jesus, I’m not mad about whatever happened two years ago, ‘cause it’s different now. I just wanna know.”

Dean’s eyebrows raise, and he gets this little smile on his face. “Fucking with your head was just a bonus, sweetie,” he says, and Seth hates, hates, hates, that even though Dean only ever says that sort of thing with his voice drenched in sarcasm, it still makes his heart beat a little faster for a second. He hates it. And he thinks Dean probably knows he hates it, and that’s why he does it, because Dean is a massacre.

“Seriously,” Seth says.

“Seriously.” Dean holds a hand over his heart. “God’s honest truth. I didn’t go there that night planning to touch your dick. You took a swing at me or something, I don’t remember real well, and then, I dunno, it happened. I wanted to touch your dick constantly from the second I got there, so it was bound to happen.”

“You did not.” Seth rolls his eyes. “You wanted to beat the shit out of me and make me look stupid.”

“Hey, you saying I can’t have one without the other?” Dean flicks Seth’s forearm. “You’ve never wanted to fuck someone and also kill ‘em a little?”

Seth snorts. That pretty much sums up the entirety of their relationship, and Dean knows it, from the glint in his eye.

“Fair,” Seth admits. “I don’t know. I guess I just, I can’t remember when it changed, you know? I can’t remember how it changed from — when I stopped. You know.”

Dean hums, and shakes his head. “‘fraid I don’t know, darlin’. You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.”

Seth narrows his eyes at him. “When I stopped telling myself it was just about the sex and realized I loved you.”

That’s always guaranteed to make Dean stop teasing him, because he’s always too busy going faintly red around the ears and the back of his neck. He coughs, crumpling up the paper sleeve his hash brown was in and shoving it to the bottom of the brown bag the rest of his garbage is in.

“Unnecessary,” Dean mutters, scowling at Seth.

“You asked,” Seth points out, and Dean huffs at him, but visibly concedes that. 

“I don’t know, I can’t tell you when it was for you. I always knew it wasn’t just anything, though.” Dean shrugs. “I was full-on obsessed with you from the start. I don’t do shit halfway.”

“I don’t think anyone would accuse you of doing shit halfway,” Seth allows. “Unless you fall asleep in the middle. Just as an example.”

“Harsh and cruel to bring up now.” Dean sticks his tongue out at Seth, an overgrown toddler, and Seth wishes he was less endeared by it. “Point taken. Anyway. I was never like, oh, this is just. Whatever. But you were clearly having like six panic attacks a day about it, so I wasn’t gonna be like, hey, Rollins, guess what, you’re the only person I’ve ever felt like this about and I think if you stopped banging me I’d probably die. You’d’ve passed out.”

Classic Dean, can only say shit like that when he’s basically making fun of himself. Seth thinks that kind of makes it more special, though. He’d get weirded out if Dean started spouting off poems about him on the regular. He’s fine with it like this, every so often feeling his stomach flutter with butterflies because Dean’s gone and said something again. 

“I would not have passed out,” he protests, anyway, because it’s the principle of the thing, and maybe he was a little neurotic about the whole thing for a while, but he was never as bad as all that.

Dean levels him with a familiar look, but he doesn’t argue. He continues, “I don’t know when, like. I don’t know. ‘Cause I was always like. Wow. So I don’t know when I was like. Wow, with like, love and shit, too.”

“That’s actually pretty romantic, you big fuckin’ loser,” says Seth, deadpan, and Dean smothers laughter behind his hand, leans heavily against Seth’s side.

“Well, what about you, then?” Dean asks, rolling out of bed and stretching before he heads toward his suitcase, to put pants on, Seth hopes, because he’s only a man and Dean’s. Dean. “There, I told you my whole big embarrassing thing. You gotta tell me your whole big embarrassing thing or it’s not fair.”

“You showed me yours so now I gotta show you mine?”

Dean turns from his suitcase and wriggles his eyebrows like Seth knew he would. “Well, I’m not gonna complain if you wanna take your pants off, Rollins, I’m only human after all.”

“Don’t be crude,” says Seth primly, and Dean falls all over himself laughing.

“Okay, dear, I won’t be crude,” he says once he’s finished, knuckling a tear from his eye. “Hoo-boy. Don’t be crude. That’s a new one. I do like it when you get all prissy, though, remind me to blow you for that later.”

“Like you need a reminder. Or a reason, for that matter.” Seth twists to hang his legs off the side of the bed. “I already told you I don’t remember, anyway,” he says, returning to what they were talking about. “I was trying to figure that out.”

“Don’t ask me,” says Dean, rummaging through all his clothes. Seth has no idea if he’s looking for something specific or if he just feels like making a mess. “I didn’t know until you fuckin’ said it to my face, and even then I was pretty sure you were making it up.”

“Well, by that point, I was pretty sure I was leaking it from my pores every time I got anywhere near you,” Seth says, waving a hand. “That wasn’t a realization or anything, I just got sick of waiting for you to say it first.”

“Oh, is that so?” Dean asks, pulling a pair of shorts from his bag and yanking them on before he strolls back over to the bed. He knees up over Seth’s lap, and Seth leans back, and lets Dean press him slow and easy into the mattress. It’s a nice mattress, better than they usually get in hotels on the road. Dean has his hands curled around Seth’s wrists, but it’s not tight, where he’s pushing them against the bed. It’s just a nice anchor. “Think about it real hard,” Dean suggests. “Now you got me all curious. I wanna know when you realized I was hot shit.”

Seth hums thoughtfully. “Well, that’s a different time,” he says. “I realized I wanted to bone you like a year before I realized I wanted to… uh.”

“Wanted to?” Dean prompts, that sparkle back in his eye.

“Wanted to,” Seth concludes. “Maybe—”

He cuts himself off and Dean doesn’t press him to continue, perhaps seeing the thoughtful cast to Seth’s face.

“Okay,” Seth says after a moment, his thoughts clearing a little. “Okay. I think I got it.”

“Tell me,” says Dean, his tone quieter than normal but no less intense, his knees squeezing Seth’s hips.

“After I won the title in developmental — the first time,” he clarifies, and Dean doesn’t interrupt him, but he does smile a little. “I fucked you with the belt on.”

Dean hums in remembrance. “Oh, that was a good night. I came on the belt. Bet it still smells like my spunk, wherever it is.”

“Glad we didn’t do that with the NXT one,” Seth muses. “Bo’d never forgive me if he knew he was carrying a defiled belt.”

Dean snorts. “Because I give a shit about Bo Dallas being scandalized. Kid gets all in a tizzy over fuckin’ seedless grapes.”

Seth laughs under his breath, but Dean’s looking at him expectantly now. He continues what he’d been saying, “I fucked you with the belt on. Not that night, the next morning.”

Dean’s brow furrows, and he’s visibly thinking, but finally he shakes his head. “Don’t follow.”

“We got pizza, I think, and you stayed over,” says Seth. He looks at Dean’s chest instead of his face, focusing on the scar on his nipple, barely visible, just a white curlicue. “Next morning, I woke up before you, and I looked at you, and I didn’t think — the word, you know, I didn’t think of it like that. But I remember that I wanted more than anything to just be what you cared about most, ‘cause you were what I cared about most. And I’d just won this title and I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but if you’d asked me to, I might’ve. And it scared me but it was you and shit with you always kind of scares me, because it’s so fucking much all the time.”

He didn’t really mean to say all that. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true, and it doesn’t mean it’s not still true. Even now, when he and Dean have been what they are for forever, and he doesn’t trouble thinking about how much he loves Dean, it’s still a lot. To love someone in this, this all-encompassing way, to have someone mean this much to him…

Before Dean, Seth’s true love was wrestling, and had been since he was fourteen. He doesn’t mind that it’s Dean now, but for anything to rival how he feels about wrestling is still big. And it doesn’t fuck him up like it used to, but if he thinks about it too much, he twists himself into knots.

Dean lets go of one of Seth’s wrists but Seth doesn’t move it from where it is when Dean tips his chin up and presses his lips against Seth’s. Seth sighs and sinks into it, relaxes against the bed and against Dean.

“Love you,” says Dean, quiet, but without hesitating, like he says it all the time. And Seth knows it, knows it like he knows how to breathe, that Dean loves him, but hearing it still knocks all the air from his lungs anyway. He knows how to breathe until he doesn’t but he always knows Dean loves him. It’s still nice to hear.

“Love you, too,” Seth says. He leans up and kisses Dean again, finally moves one of his hands to slide it into Dean’s hair. It’s not a kiss that’s going to lead to anything, doesn’t set Seth’s hips pressing up against Dean or make him feel that telltale heat in his stomach, fog in his head, but it makes him feel warm and content, and he doesn’t need anything else right now.

“That’s enough of that,” Dean says brusquely, hopping down from the bed and looking at Seth expectantly. “Roman up?”

“Mm,” Seth says vaguely. “Answered the phone when I called him earlier, but probably not. Probably being a layabout.”

Dean grins, sharp and disastrous. “We should wake him up,” he suggests, ideas running rampant across his face. “He might be late otherwise.”

“Late for what?” Seth asks, because their flight isn’t until the afternoon and Dean damn well knows it.

“Things,” Dean says vaguely, waving a hand. “Stuff. We should be good friends.”

“Put a shirt on first,” suggests Seth.

“I don’t feel like it,” replies Dean, already on the hunt for the room key. Seth sighs, and digs it out of his pocket, holding it up. Dean takes it with another grin and smacks a kiss to Seth’s forehead. “Coming with?”

Seth shakes his head, but stands up. “Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t get yourself murdered.”

“Roman would never,” says Dean, aghast, holding a hand to his chest. “Roman is a nice boy with a good heart.”

Seth snorts. “If you say so. You might wanna remind him of that when he’s beating the shit out of you.”

Dean drops the act. “Oh, like he could,” he grumbles, shoving the key card into the pocket of his shorts and pulling the door open. “After you,” he invites.

Seth looks at him, suspicious. “You just want to look at my ass,” he mutters. Dean laughs when he goes ahead of him anyway.

“Always, princess. You got a bucket handy?”


End file.
